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eAmerica 



First 



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JllQ. CCiANDr 



y ^ ^ ^k This should be the war- 
cry of every true American. 
The phrase has the real 
patriotic ring that thrills the 
heart. It fires the blood 
like the appeal of a modern 
Paul Revere, exhorting all 
^^g citizens to rally to the ban- 
ner that leads them to the 
canons, crags, lakes and rivers of their own 
country. Don't be hypnotized by weird tales 
of European travel. There is not an attrac- 
tion in the Old World that cannot be dupli- 
cated and discounted by the phenomena of 
America. Facilities for travel are superior 
and cheaper at home than anything you may 
expect in foreign lands. Accommodations 
for the affluent, and others in more moderate 
circumstances, await the tourist at every turn 
of the road. You get what you want, and 
pay for what you get, and are not hounded 
to death by a horde of mendicants. You 
encounter the frank-faced business-like Amer- 
ican who intuitively knows your wants and 
sees that they are supplied. 



4 SEE EUROPE IF YOU WILL 

THEREFORE come with mc into the 
recesses of the Rocky Mountains, view- 
ing enroute the masterpieces of the 
Creator's handiwork from the wondrous 
Niagara, through the stupendous chasm of 
the Royal Gorge, over the Great Continental 
Divide to the renowned groves of the Yose- 
mite, the thrilling scenes of the Yellowstone, 
the pastoral quaintness of the California 
missions nestling in real Arcadian simplicity 
in rich colored orange groves, the giant ice- 
clad peaks that fringe Puget Sound, or the 
balmy shades of the Columbia. Come and 
commune with Nature. Steep your senses in 
the gladness and sweetness of an outing where 
the defiling hands of vandals have not left their 
foul imprint. Get into the open where you can 
observe the achievements of the Great Archi- 
tect and worship his handiwork by mountain 
torrents and traverse silent paths that for 
centuries have been untrodden by foot of 
man. 

Come by rail, come in your auto-car, 
come afoot if you like, but come I 

Enterprise has paved the way to the very 
heart of the mountains and the old cry of 



BUT SEE AMERICA FIRST 5 

remoteness and inaccessibility has been ban- 
ished by the pioneers of travel who have 
made the most distant points within easy 
reach of the principal resorts of the West. 
Millions of Americans have visited this pan- 
theon and countless thousands of Europeans 
have added their praises to the constantly 
ascending anthem. 

SEE AMERICA FIRST: 
See her in her grandest moods where 
phenomenal forces are engaged in their 
constructive and destructive work. Penetrate 
the wilds where the workshop of Nature 
invites you to revel in the abandon and 
grotesquerie of undisturbed creation. Go 
with bounding heart and tingling brain to 
absorb the grandeur of scenery and worship 
at the shrine of Nature where your heart 
offerings of gratitude will arise like incense 
into the spires and recesses, into the cathe- 
dral-like crags and sky-vaulted spaces 
resounding with the echo of never ceasing 
cascades whose tumultuous chorus swells in 
constant diapason, soaring and receding in 
obedience to the gentle breezes that fan these 
sylvan cloisters. 



6 SEE EUROPE IF YOU WILL 

WITH a stroke that resounded across 
the continent, the keynote of Amer- 
ican travel was launched at a con- 
vention held at Salt Lake City, January 25, 
attended by two hundred patriotic delegates 
representing the leading communities and 
commercial organizations of the Empire 
bounded by the Missouri River and the 
Pacific Ocean. The governors of Colorado, 
Wyoming, Utah, Washington, Idaho, Ore- 
gon, Nebraska and Kansas, were most 
enthusiastic in their endorsement of the prop- 
osition, which, after three days of unselfish 
labor, was incorporated in a concrete pro- 
gramme of action calculated to bring about 
results in harmony with the suggestions 
offered by the best orators and publicists of 
the Nation. 

Hon. Heber M. Wells, former governor 
of Utah and president of the Salt Lake Com- 
mercial Club, in a brilliant address of wel- 
come electrified the convention and evoked 
a wave of enthusiasm that only subsided after 
the orator had repeatedly bowed his thanks. 
The address is as follows: 




BUT SEE AMERICA FIRST 7 

ellowAmericans: 

"As chairman of the 
committee that has called 
this conference, I am proud 
of the results thus far 
achieved. We have here 
today an assembly of dis- 
tinguished men who represent every section 
of our great country. It is with special 
pride that we greet the governors of states. 
They have committed for a time the impor- 
tant interests of the people who elected them, 
into the care of others, and have journeyed 
to this city to take part in a conference hav- 
ing for its object interests of even greater 
consequence to their citizens than those they 
left behind. If it shall happen that success 
shall crown our efforts, these governors will 
be the great generals in our patriotic fight 
for greater America — for this movement, if 
it means anything at all, means that America 
is to be immensely prospered by its fruition. 



8 SEE EUROPE IF YOU WILL 

'w A ttE are pleased to welcome the 
^y^y mayors of our great cities who have 
w w scented from atar the battle which is 
to be waged for their constituents, for that 
which benefits the whole country must neces- 
sarily benefit each individual of each muni- 
cipality. 

"The representatives of our great trans- 
portation lines — those chief arteries of com- 
merce that pulsate with the good, red blood 
of our industrial life and without which our 
country would speedily return to its primi- 
tive inertia — they are the wise men of our 
conference, upon whose beneficent counsels 
the success or failure of all our hopes must 
largely depend. I make my obeisance to the 
wise men. 

"We extend the right hand of fellowship 
to the envoys of other commercial organiza- 
tions who, like ourselves, are soldiers in the 
cause of promoting the material welfare of 
their respective communities. 

"The newspaper men, like the poor, are 
always with us, and let me say if they were 
not 'with us' in this enterprise our chances 
for success would be slim indeed. 



BUT SEE AMERICA FIRST 9 

'■nu^HOUGH it is the province of others 
I who will follow me to extend to you 
-■- that special and official welcome which 
becomes our city and our state, I will be 
pardoned, perhaps, if I admit in advance 
that we are downright glad to have you all 
within our gates, and if I assure you that it 
will be one of the greatest pleasures of its 
life for the organization which I represent — 
the Salt Lake City Commercial Club — to 
make you feel you are at home. 

"The movement which has emblazoned 
upon its banners, the motto: 'See Europe if 
you will, but see America first,' was con- 
ceived in no sordid spirit of local self adver- 
tisement. Its object is to exploit the special 
resources and attractions of Salt Lake City 
or of Utah or of the Rocky Mountains or 
even of western America. Indeed, the great- 
est care has been exercised in all our propa- 
ganda to have it well understood that its 
object was bigger and grander than any mere 
locality, but that it was conceived in the 
interests and for the benefit of all America. 
No thought, or word, or suggestion has ever 
emanated from the committee who sum- 
moned you here that these delegates were to 



lo SEE EUROPE IF YOU WILL 

be assembled for any less purpose than to 
devise a plan to divert at least a portion of 
the travel of Americans which now goes to 
Europe and other foreign countries, to their 
own country first. That is the aim of this 
conference, and it is its only aim. When 
that object is accomplished, we who dwell in 
these mountains will be content with such 
proportionate benefits as may accrue to our 
city and our state, the same as you who 
represent the other parts of America. 

' f^ PEAKING personally, I have never 
^^ been to Europe. But I have bathed 
^^ in the buoyant waters of both the 
Atlantic and the Pacific, have gazed through 
southern mists out upon the Gulf of Mexico 
and have traversed the Great Lakes and the 
Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence. I 
have heard the great Niagara roar, and have 
stood spell-bound upon the brink of the 
Grand Canyon of the Colorado amid that 
death-like stillness of nature described by 
Mark Twain as 'So still you can hear the 
microbes gnaw.' 

"I have stalked elk in Jackson's Hole 
and caught fish in the streams of Yellow- 



BUT SEE AMERICA FIRST ri 

Stone Park and boiled them hard by in 
a geyser without taking them off the hook. 
I have floated on the briny surface of the 
Great Salt Lake and shot the chutes on Sutro 
Heights. I have looped the loop on Coney 
Island and breathed the fragrant sighs of 
orange groves in Southern California. I 
have perspired in the humid atmosphere of 
the Mississippi valley, and thrown snow balls 
at the altitudes of Pikes Peak. I have stood 
at the bottom of the Royal Gorge and mar- 
veled at the stupendous cleft, and tobog- 
ganed down the slopes of Marshall Pass in 
a railroad train. I have traversed the Great 
Plains of the 'bounding west' and have 
tarried wonder-bound amid the majestic 
beauties of the Yosemite Valley. I have 
gazed in rapt wonder at the mighty Missouri 
rolling down to the sea and have visited the 
Great Northwest where flows the beautiful 
Columbia. Yet I am not ready for Europe. 
I admit that Paris offers its allurements, but 
I have not yet beheld the natural bridges of 
San Juan County, of my own fair state, and 
so the Champs Elysee will have to wait. 



12 SEE EUROPE IF YOU WILL 

W J PON a trip to New York some years 
I I ago I became acquainted with a man 
^^ from Albany — a young druggist — who 
had acquired a competency and was setting 
off for a vacation. I asked him where he 
was going, and wreathed in ecstatic smiles, 
he blurted the one word, 'Europe.' I asked 
him if he had ever visited a place called 
Niagara Falls, which lay a hundred or two 
miles to the west of him, and he said : ' It's 
nothing but a lot of water/ 

"Now gentlemen, I submit that that is 
the type of fellow we are after. If we can 
but spread the gospel of 'See America First' 
so that some of these easterners who now 
spend their good American money at Monte 
Carlo can be induced to come up and take 
higher ground and visit some of the suburbs 
of their home towns, I feel that our mission 
will not have been in vain. 

'w TS promoters admit that this is no new 
I conception. For years patriotic Ameri- 
-"- can newspapers and magazines, and elo- 
quent American speakers have sought to 
stem the tide of foreign travel, and figures 
have been compiled and quoted showing the 



BUT SEE UMERICA FIRST 13, 

enormity of the volume of money our citi- 
zens have been pouring into the lap of the 
old world. But the warning voice of these 
watchmen on the towers of our land have 
gone unheeded, and year by year in ever 
increasing hordes our countrymen have 
swarmed to Europe, and come back again in 
the fall smelling of Eau de Cologne, with 
their pants rolled up and a large monocle in 
their right eye. 

' ^^O THAT while experience has seemed 
^Jp to demonstrate that the protest we 
voice at this conference is but as a cry 
in the wilderness, it has today this added 
significance, that it has taken root — that the 
loud reveille sounded from so many mountain 
tops has been heard in the valleys, and east and 
west and north and south have answered back 
the call until a band of intrepid spirits not con- 
structed on the European plan has assembled 
beneath this roof, who will proclaim to their 
neighbors throughout America that we have 
some scenery at home and that $200,000,000 
a year cannot be taken out of our people's 
hands and put into hands across the sea with- 
out at least a good, vigorous American kick. 



14 SEE EUROPE IF YOU WILL 

"It is for you, delegates of this conference 
to put this protest in plain EngHsh so 
that he who runs to the continent every 
year may read. It may not be necessary to 
frame a new declaration of independence, 
although we do hold these truths to be self- 
evident — that when in the course of human 
events it becomes necessary for one portion 
of our people to dissolve a pernicious prac- 
tice which compels them to pay tribute to 
another, a decent respect to the opinions of 
mankind requires that they should declare 
the causes which impel them to see America 
first. And for this we are met." 



BUT SEE AMERICA FIRST 



15 




Curecand Needle 

on the Marshall Pass Line 
Denver and Rio Grande Redlroad 



THIS little book is NOT COPYRIGHTED, in 
the hope that it will be of greater aid in 
spreading the gospel of "SEE AMERICA 
FIRST." Any person has permission to use it in 
whole or in part, including the eagle design on page 2, 
electrotypes of which may be had of Carson-Harper 
Co., Denver, at 50c each. 



Imprint: Carson-Harper, Denver 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




016 092 148 U 



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Conservation Resources 



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